Valentine Blues

The Sundance press notes describe Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine, which had its big press screening last night, as “an intimate, shattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage.” That sorta works if you leave out “shattering” and replace it with “heavily affected in a way that may be tolerable for some viewers, depending on their tastes and limits.”


Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling

It’s an old-fashioned arthouse relationship movie with next to no story but an intensely observational art-bubble thing going on in which we’re shown a relationship between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in two time periods — young, hot and feverishly in love and somewhat older, frustrated and not in love or certainly less so.

And on and on it goes for two hours. Back and forth, back and forth with lotsa stylistic coolness. I was in and out of it — admiring the naked emotionalism at times, dozing off, hating being in the world of another twitchy and heavily mannered Gosling performance with cigarettes, checking my watch, sitting there like a Val Lewton zombie and half-wishing I was somewhere else. But knowing at the same time I was watching a pretty good film, or certainly one made by some undeniably talented folks who would rather shoot themselves than make another relationship movie in the same old way.

For the most part Blue Valentine is about Cianfrance showing off his John Cassevetes chops — one deep invadin’, high falutin’ close-up intimacy moment after another with the camera doing the old duck-and-weave.

It’s basically about Gosling and Michelle Williams giving us their acting-class utmost as a couple of not-very-bright instinctuals who want each other and lah-dee-dah-dee-dah and then they’re older and life is harder with the burden of the cute little daughter and all. I couldn’t tell what was wrong except for Williams being frustrated with Gosling’s blue-collar complacency and Gosling going “whassa matter?….wait, wait, whassa matter?” and smoking so many damn cigarettes (even while holding his daughter) that I wanted to pick him off with a high-powered rifle.

Gosling drives me nuts every time. He’s always doing that rop-bop-a-loo-bop, always focused on behaving in his own particular way and making damn sure that we notice this.

Gosling is inventive and never predictable, and I’m going to loathe him for years and years to come for this very nimbleness, this determination to imprint and infiltrate each and every film he’s in with a Ryan Gosling mood spray. He’s a behavioralist who lives inside a very deep mine shaft, and when he takes over a movie (as he does this one) you’re suddenly deep in that mine with him and noticing that air is thin and wondering why but feeling it might be time to get the hell out of there, and yet knowing this would be heresy because Gosling is, at the end of the day, a very intense presence with a very shifty bag of tricks that most other actors would never devise, much less resort to.

I felt like I needed some kind of flu shot after watching 30 or 40 minutes of Blue Valentine. By the end the flu had totallly taken over my system. I felt defeated, spent. But it’s a pretty good film. There’s never a moment in which you’re saying to yourself “this is crap, I can’t take this.” What you’re saying is “this a high-end thing made by some fiercely committed people, and I can barely stand it.”

I especially admired Gosling’s receding hairline in the parts in which he’s somewhat older. The whole time I was wondering if Gosling’s hair is really thinning and that he wore a hairpiece for the youthful scenes, or if he and Cianfrance decided to have his head partly shaved and then have the makeup guy give him a very realistic thinning-hair coif. Either way I was mesmerized. Blue Valentine deserves some kind of special commendation for this aspect alone.

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35 thoughts on “Valentine Blues”

  1. “The whole time I was wondering if Gosling’s hair is really thinning and that he wore a hairpiece…”

    I’m waiting for the day when these self-reflective musings just completely take over the reviews and entire films are appraised through the prism of personal quirks.

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  2. Wells, the writing in this post is so good that I bet even Gosling would smile a little at it.

    Reviews like this (along with the occasional cowboy hat story) are what keep me coming back to this site. Keep up the good work, man.

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  4. Those two scream “acting class” with every role. They were made for each other. They should remake Wendy & Lucy with the lovely Gosling as the missing dog.

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  7. I love reading your blog, Jeff, but I’m wondering what late 20s/early 30s actors you really like. Clearly Ledger was the best of the bunch, but it seems to me you hate the aura of two of the other two “bests”–those being Gosling and Gordon Levitt. I like these actors and admire the fact they want to make interesting/good films as opposed to big budget spectacles that waste their talents (ala, say, Shia LeBeouf).

    Yes, they have specific presences, but, generally speaking, so to did/do DeNiro, Pacino, Depp, Penn etc., etc. I’m not trying to say they are in the same league–believe me, I’m not–all I’m saying is even the best actors usually fall back on the usual, usual to some degree.

    So, what I’m honestly wondering is if you just hate this generation’s general aura? If not, who do you like? Paul Dano, Jake Gyllenhaal, James McAvoy, Emile Hirsch, Anthony Mackie, Jesse Eisenberg?

    I know it’s sort of been done over and over, but your tastes are so particular, I’d be interested in a post that highlights who you think is the next wave of talent so to speak. Say the top 20 actors under (or around) 30?

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  8. Paul Dano, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emile Hirsch, Anthony Mackie and Jesse Eisenberg are all cool. Take a contract out on Gosling, Gordon Levitt and James McAvoy — that’s all.

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  9. Agree with Wells. I still really like RG in LARS but he always is too mopey. He REALLY needs to bust out a comedy or somehting. And quick.

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  11. This movie looks like hipster central. Is this the one with music supplied by Grizzly Bear?

    Gosling is taking on so many mopey characters because he believes it’s the way to exorcise his Mickey Mouse Club past. It’s like Sean Penn who escaped the image of Jeff Spicoli by doing dreary drama after dreary drama.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEgGWHtVIhQ

    He needs to host SNL or something. Lighten up, dude.

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  17. >For the most part Blue Valentine is about Cianfrance showing off his John Cassevetes chops — one deep invadin’, high falutin’ close-up intimacy moment after another with the camera doing the old duck-and-weave.

    This is the kind of writing I come here for.

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  19. “Take a contract out on Gosling, Gordon Levitt and James McAvoy — that’s all.”

    Two out of three I’m with you, but I think Levitt’s a strong actor. He just needs a director who can make a good movie around him.

    But, also, I don’t like Gyllenhaal or Eisenberg much.

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  20. Yeah, Gosling should absolutely sign up to do things like THE UGLY TRUTH or PAUL BLART, MALL COP, instead of, you know, trying to do good movies.

    Calling him “mannered” is one thing – I don’t agree, but I can understand, sort of (although anyone who thinks that and then turns around and says they like his performance in LARS & THE REAL GIRL, which really is mannered, is missing something). But Jesus fucking Christ, aren’t actors supposed to take their work seriously? And it’s not like he hasn’t done anything “mainstream” – he did two thrillers, MURDER BY NUMBERS and FRACTURE, and while I wasn’t crazy about the latter, it was hardly the type of movie that could be accused of taking itself too seriously.

    I think the people who think Gosling needs to lighten up are the ones who need to lighten up.

    Oh, and of the ones Wells lists, the only one I don’t really care for is McAvoy, and even he turned me around somewhat in the original “State of Play” (Dano I’m reserving judgment on if only because I’ve only seen him in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and THERE WILL BE BLOOD).

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  21. lipranzer I am pretty sure you can do great work and still not be this indie-arthouse-tho that Gosling keep on doing over and over, for me his work lately scream “look at my acting skills”. For me he just doesnt have the guts and the courage to do the big films.

    He lacks ambition, it was ambition that made Leo sgin for Titanic and that film changed his entire career. He now picks the best of what Hollywood has to offer, working with the best directors, no longer needs to go to film festivals begging film distributors to buy his films.

    I remember reading an interview where Gosling said that he just wouldnt feel confortable carrying a big budget film and thats the thing, when Chris Pine sign to do Star Trek he said that during the shooting he realized that he was carrying the film, he was the lead and he enjoyed the feeling, he said that he felt good and thats is it. You can bet that carrying a project like The Aviator or The Departed makes Leo feels good, and you need to have guts because if a project like this bombs people will came after you. If Valentine doesnt get a distributor and goers staright to DVD people will hardly make a big deal, just another tiny film didnt get love.

    Oh, and McAvoy and Gordon-Levitt do not belong to these group, with works like Atonement and Wanted McAvoy showed that he wants a piece of maistream game, he will be big. The same for Gordon-Levvit, his work on 500 Summer was fantastic and better than all Gosling last films, he just did Inception with Chris Nolan and I wouldnt be surprised if he got picked to be the new spider man now that Marc Weeb i going to direct the film.

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  22. I like nearly everybody on Wells’ list, but not one of them has topped Gosling in HALF NELSON. He was Oscar nom’d for a reason and, as far as I’m concerned, should’ve taken the award. He’s young and he’s still figuring stuff out (though he already knew enough to get out of THE LOVELY BONES) but he’s a hell of an actor.

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  23. Julien, if there are actors who want to carry mainstream movies, can carry them, and seek out good ones to make that aren’t dumbed-down, more power to them (though I’m pessimistic about that happening with the Spiderman movie, and while I think WANTED is silly fun when Angelina Jolie is on-screen, I hardly think that’s a good example of good mainstream films). But shouldn’t there also be room for people like Gosling, who want to stay outside the mainstream?

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  24. Have to say it: Paul Dano was the worst thing in TWBB. His acting during the last twenty minutes is horrible. Horrible.

    There but for the grace of God goes Ryan Gosling in another episode of Gossip Girl or One Tree Hill. That’s about what level he is at as an actor. If the rest of you want to fall for his Johnny Depp/Sean Penn meets Ryan Phililpe/Giovanni Ribisi/Jeremy Davies mumbly-squint-mellow-sexy shtick, by all means, go ahead. The reason he won’t do anything else besides what he does is because he can’t. He has absolutely nothing going for him but a fake gravitas and an unearned sense that he has seen the dark side of humanity and has come back to report to us what he has seen. As far as I can tell, the only thing he has seen that is of any interest to me is what Rachel McAdams looks like naked. When he can create a character that doesn’t look, sound and move like the lead singer of some random Williamsburg noise-psyche-folk band, let me know and I’ll check in to see what he’s doing.

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  33. Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that:

    Regards,

    Ashwood University

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    Reply ↓

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